I have finished the current stage of creation for the Island Landscape!
Here is a screen shot from Mudbox

I know its not the same as the feel and perspective you get inside Unity, but hopefully I'll be able to post the Unity Web Player file as soon as I get it imported!
Then everyone can look around and see what they think

Next I'll put the mesh through the decimation filter, and into Maya for the UV Layout!

So a step in my process from MudBox to 3D Coat is having to take the model into Maya for a moment and enclose the mesh, basically taking the edges of the plane and extruding down and together to make it into something of a cube with terrain on top.
Its kind of an important step as you can't import your model into 3D Coat for Voxel sculpting without having an enclosed mesh.

Here's a little screen shot. I think it looks really cool, like something out of the planet creation factory in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, hehe

I've been able to get the Landscape mesh and the TriPlanar Terrain texture to work together much better! especially with the smaller cliffs that were being completely covered by grass before.

Here is a screen shot of one of the smaller cliffs. As you can see the cliff face is all gray and doesn't have any patches of grass on it
I've started spreading around the cliff breakups so I can get a better feel for what they will look like and what the actual rock texture will look like on the cliff face.

There is a lot more of this stage to do, fixing the cliffs and spreading around rock clusters, lots of busy work for me, but then things will really start coming together and hopefully looking way better!

As a Self-Critique, I'm taking a long hard look at my current Landscape, and it just doesn't feel that great to me... There's no volume or interesting features, its just little peaks on flat ground all the to the mountains.

I tried to create a more hilly landscape in the beginning, but in the game in felt weird always having to look up and not being able to see anything very far in front of you.
So I went with the topology you've seen so far, a more level and flat environment with peaks of rock sticking up across the landscape until it reaches the mountains. But now it doesn't feel very alive or fun to run around in... so what to do?

I am Re-Approaching my Landscape with some new ideas on Hills, Cliffs, Plateaus, and most importantly Perspective! Finding ways to show off many interesting and layered Hills in the mid ground no matter where your standing and without having to look way up or way down everywhere.
Stay Tuned for a whole new Environment Landscape!
- Bergquist

Well, for me the texture density is too low and terrain lacks micro features, like grass and smaller rocks. In my experiments 5 months ago with terrain I got the best results using default Unity terrain sculpting (pen tablet is a must). When it comes to the Wenda workflow I used this plugin http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/12...M-Black-Edition

For light setup I used two directional lights - one bluish (sky hint) one yellow-orange (sun) I think with 60 degrees rotation difference between them.

I was trying to make desert like terrain. I'll try to find screenshots (or actual build) from then - I hope they weren't on my crashed external though

yeah, the textures were completely temporary stand-ins for testing my new shader script,
and you're right, they are not scaled properly at all and look pretty much horrible, hehe

At first I thought I would get the topology of my landscape worked out and then go back in and add all the micro features you were talking about,
but now I think I need to have those features more prominent than that
with micro flows to the land centered around those features...

My next version of the landscape will look considerably different.
hope you like it!

For the last few days I've been working hard atRe-Modeling the entire Island Landscape!
I haven't finished yet, but things are starting to come together,
so I thought I would share the progress and see what everyone thinks

I think the shapes and volumes are difficult to make out in MudBox,
but hopefully I'll have this done by weeks end,
and everyone can see it inside Unity!
Comments & Critiques are Always Welcome! And Stay Tuned for more Updates!
- Bergquist

After long hours of sculpting more landscape features and cliff faces than I can count, and still having at least half the environment to finish, I have decided to rethink how I'm going about such a large scale piece of landscape.

I am going to Re-Create the Landscape one last time.
This time utilizing both of important things I've learned so far.

The first is about chopping up the landscape to give the player dynamic scenic views no matter where they are in the game.

And the second is to utilize a kind of fractal modularity system where I will construct the landscape out of large pre-made modular chunks of land, then have several smaller chunks of modular land pieces to break up and divide those, and finally a third set of the smallest environment pieces such as smaller boulders and rocks to finish off the details of the features.

In the End, this should allow me to build the level with tremendous speed and control while maintaining a very nice quality of graphics.
Wish me Luck!
- Bergquist

For the past week I've been working on creating a kind of large scale fractally modular landscape. I think its going very well, but lots of tedious work to chug away at with not much to show yet..
So, today I decided to take a break from sculpting and work on a bit of sparkly stuff
and started scripting a Bloom VFX script to accent my landscape and environment features!

Here is a screenshot of the old landscape and temporary textures
with the New Bloom script!

Notice how the blue of the sky wraps over onto the landscape compared to my previous posts
I tried to be subtle with it, yet still noticeable...
What do you guys think?
Environment model update Coming Soon!
- Bergquist

Ello CGS,
This evening I continued my break from landscape creation,
and started working on my final Grass Material.

I think i got all the repeating patterns out,
set it up a nice fade into the distance,
and then laid back over some fractal gradient break-ups

Here is a screen shot of what it looks like so far.
The grass material is only applied to the hilly plane in front of the camera.
It ends close to the top of the picture, right under the first cliff.

So does everyone like it?
any suggestions on how to make it look better?

C&C are always Welcome! Stay Tuned for more Updates!
- Bergquist

Edit:Since I've switched to using Terrain instead of geometry pieces for my Landscape,
This Grass Shader doesn't work anymore... I can still use the same concepts to remake another one for the Terrain Shader, but I'll have to re-program it again

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